Bokor Post Office

This was a strange-looking stilted structure; it had an arched concrete roof, with a sort of false angular eave built above it with brick. A footbridge connected it with the nearby road. There was extensive damage to the rear of it, there had been a lot of fighting on the plateau in 1979, and this building was the most obviously war-damaged. Many stories tell of a battle between Vietnamese/Salvation Front soldiers fighting Pol Pot troops who had taken refuge in the church. The post office was directly in the firing line, and most of the back wall was knocked out by a mortar round.
There are conflicting reports on the damage to all the buildings on the plateau, which have all been stripped completely bare, with channels cut out to scavenge copper electrical conduits and almost all woodwork gone. As per usual, this gets blamed on the “Khmer Rouge,” as is almost anything that looks old and broken. Although the combined Vietnamese and Salvation Front managed to wrest the plateau from Pol Pot’s forces in 1979, in later years the Kampot area became a hot-bed for resistance forces and Bokor changed hands many times.
One ex-resistance fighter who lived in the area from the late 1970s till recent times claimed in an interview that the hill-station was preserved in good condition during the Pol Pot regime, and it was only later that Vietnamese troops who were stationed there scavenged everything. Blaming the other side is par for the course but it doesn’t really matter, war tends to destroy everything anyway, whether by direct damage or the poverty and desperation that inevitably follows.
In the early 1970s, as the area became caught up in the war, and B52 strikes were pounding coastal parts of Kampot, the resort was abandoned again. The manager of the Bokor Palace Hotel had enough foresight to see what was about to happen, and took the entire contents of the hotel’s wine cellar down the hill to nearby Kep, where he hid it. He returned from exile more than twenty years later, in 1993, and recovered the untouched wine from the stash-place, and managed to sell some for a good price.
Anyway, back to the post office. It was recently demolished, along with a few other buildings up on the hill. The developers claimed that it was in a very dangerous state, which seems reasonable enough as it was one of the more wrecked structures. The Bokor Palace Hotel/Casino itself is due to be refurbished, good news as there was an initial period when it wasn’t clear whether it would be kept or not.

Bokor

A bit of a detour from Phnom Penh, about 200 kilometers in fact, is Bokor mountain, probably my favorite place in the country. Its name comes from the mountain’s similarity to the hump of a cow. At its best vantage points there is a steep cliff hundreds of meters high which ends in the lush and noisy canopy of a vast rainforest which stretches another ten kilometers or so, almost to the coast. In this relatively flat country it is quite remarkable.
The plateau at the top of the mountain has no history of human habitation, due to its inaccessibility. There are hill-tribes that exist in the immediate vicinity, but on lower elevations. French explorers reached the plateau around 1912, and it was decided not too long afterwards to build a hill-station there. To those unfamiliar with the concept, a hill-station was a facility built by colonial authorities on hills, with resorts, hospitals and hotels available to those who needed respite from the insufferably hot plains below.
The road to the mountain winds more than forty kilometers around the edges of little hills, culverts, ravines and bridges in dense jungle at first, but later evens out towards the top. This was built with corvée labor, which was the French administration’s attempt to collect taxes from people who couldn’t pay them, by forcing them into civil engineering projects. In this particular project many of the laborers would have been Vietnamese prisoners from nearby colonies, rather than locals, however this doesn’t excuse the huge death-toll amongst workers. Some estimate that as many as 20,000 people died on the construction of the road.
Eventually the road was finished, and development gradually took off. There was a “marie” or mayor’s office, a hospital, a church, a post-office and some hotels which at times in their history served as casinos, along with a few private residences in the surrounding area. There were also huge farms on the plateau experimenting with and growing different temperate vegetables for the resort, and of course many new villages to house all the local staff and farmers. The area became embroiled in war in the late 1940s and at first the hotel was used as a hospital, but was abandoned after being set on fire by a group called the "Black Dragon." It was rebuilt in the early 1960s and officially opened again in January 1962, withe the addition of a casino. It again became cut off by fighting in the early 1970s, and was off-limits to visitors for the best part of the next three decades. There was fierce fighting on the mountain after the 1979 Vietnamese led intervention, and for many of the following 20 years the area was fought over, changing hands from government held to DK held and back again innumerable times. Very little of this is apparent now, there are just a few concrete shells of buildings and weeds, some bullet holes and blown-up corners on otherwise sound looking structures, and until recently at least, a skeleton of a anti-aircraft gun emplacement on one of the hills. Of course it’s being developed now, I’ll write more on that later.
The big picture with the Volkswagen campers in the foreground is from I’d guess the early 1960’s, and is my favorite picture of the Bokor Palace Hotel. It also proves that scratching graffiti over any suitable surface is not a new phenomenon up there.
Most of the other pictures are visual comparisons I made between various buildings as they looked in 2005 and how they appeared in the 1968 movie “Rose de Bokor”. At the time I couldn’t find many old pictures of the area, so they are low-res frame grabs rather than the clearer images I’d have preferred. Some of the other pictures were taken at night on long exposures, and were artificially lit with a mag-lite.